MV...that's great to hear.
Obviously speakers have the final carry of the signal that we call music....my objective with the system upgrade...get as close as possible to the live sound whether it be for recording or an audience for the money. I've heard live music in many different venues, large and small. My system of 20 yrs did a pretty good job of delivering on parts of that, but not all.
In my demo phase, I found that speakers in that $2k to $3k range were very good...20 yrs old but I have pretty good speakers now and I felt they were somewhat lateral to most of those.....speakers in the $5k to $6k range seem to check all of the boxes...The Salks I ordered are less than $4k and my expectation is a performance in the same vein or better as those $5 -$6k speakers.
The Philharmonic3...might be the best value you can get under $4k anywhere...they are large imposing speakers so they didn't work for me, but they highly touted drivers and a industry noted crossover artist/designer/engineer Dennis Murphy. One of the AH posters, The Warrior has a pair.
My main point is opening up your speaker budget I think will do wonders for the end result.
I had a loose number in my head for an overall budget, but I'm not likely to do this again anytime soon so I didn't want to make too many SQ compromises I might regret later because my budget was not high enough...I was thinking 50% of my loose number on the speakers which was $7k max...with a lot of time invested here and researching I was able to come in under budget by $1200+...of course I have been spending some of that on some new tunes
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I have 3+k song on itunes and recently shifted everything over to JRiver v23...
Superior management tool, player, pretty smart too...anytime I add to my itunes acct, the files automatically import to JRiver. I've yet to really dive into all the features, but setting up playlists, etc, basic functions I learned on the fly pretty quickly...well worth the fee for the standard one time license.
